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Saturday, 30 December 2017

A team of researchers led by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the University of Geneva launched Grippenet.ch, a webpage and mobile App based platform aimed at providing participatory monitoring of Influenza. Your participation can contribute to enhance this system for better Flu monitoring and to develop novel approaches to prevent epidemics.

The Flu is a major public health issue, resulting in increased medical care consumption, absenteeism and mortality, to name a few. Along with several partners, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) and the University of Geneva (UNIGE) developed and deployed Grippenet.ch, the Swiss component of a European initiative for participatory influenza surveillance called Influenzanet. Through this system, data on Flu is contributed directly by citizen participants, contrary to Sentinella, the epidemiological surveillance system active in Switzerland since 1986, where reports of Flu are reported by health practitioners.

Results show that Grippenet.ch could prove faster, more flexible, and a useful supplemental tool for early detection and monitoring of infectious outbreaks. The Swiss researchers and their collaborators have also released a mobile App, which allows participants to contribute measurements made by their mobile phone sensors. This data could allow scientists to better understand the transmission of the virus and to leverage information technologies and human behavioral responses to help contain epidemics.

Each year in Switzerland, the Flu causes anywhere from 112,000 to 275,000 medical consultations, as well as an excess of mortality among the elderly and additional 97 million francs costs to the health care system. Absenteeism-related costs amount to an additional 200 million francs. All these reasons and more motivated the start of the Grippenet project in December 2016, allowing the monitoring of influenza epidemics though the direct action of Swiss citizens and residents. Based on the European Influenzanet platform that started in 2003 in the Netherlands and Belgium, Grippenet.ch was implemented and launched in Switzerland by the Professorship of Computational Social Sciences (ETHZ), the Institute of Global Health of the Faculty of Medicine at UNIGE, the Digital Epidemiology Laboratory (EPFL, Lausanne) and the National Reference Center for Influenza (HUG, Geneva).

"The principle is very simple. After an anonymous and free registration on grippenet.ch, participants receive a short survey on a weekly basis, enquiring about whether they suffered from potentially Flu-related symptoms" explains Aude Richard, Coordinator for the French speaking Grippenet platform at the Institute of Global Health at the Faculty of Medicine of UNIGE. Throughout the winter of 2016-2017, 342 Swiss residents informed researchers about the presence or absence of Flu-like symptoms in themselves and in those living with them.

An interactive information platform

The website is also an educational and information platform. "The more aware and informed people are, the better they can protect themselves," says Dirk Helbing, Professor of Computational Social Science at the ETH Zurich. "I am thinking, for example, about measures such as vaccination, avoiding intense contact with crowds, and better hand hygiene.” Contributors can view a map of Switzerland to see the Flu levels reported by the community in different cantons, including their own, as well as other statistics on Flu incidence. They can also access more information about influenza and preventive measures.

Predicting and containing Influenza through social-sensing

The Grippenet.ch team just launched a new Android App (currently in German and English but soon appearing in French also), initiating a research study with the aim to develop cutting-edge Machine Learning models to predict Flu exposure through sensor data. Flu transmission is driven by human mobility and contact patterns, which can be inferred using measurements made through mobile phone sensors. Furthermore, this is done in a privacy preserving fashion by aggregating and anonymizing the data that is shared with researchers. “If enough people contribute their measurements, we might be able to build a system that learns to make accurate predictions of who is at high risk of being sick, using regularities in the data. This requires user trust and the utmost respect for their privacy”, explains Olivia Woolley, who runs the Grippenet.ch team at ETH Zurich. “Our ultimate goal is to create a tool that gives people accurate information about their exposure to the Flu so that they have the power to take smart actions to protect themselves and avoid spreading the Flu to others.” The App and study are developped in collaboration with the the Computational Epidemiology Laboratory (ISI, Turin), and the center for Embeded Intelligence (DFKI, Germany) and partially funded by the European Communities H2020 Program, namely the project called CIMPLEX: Bringing CItizens, Models and Data together in Participatory, Interactive SociaL EXploratories (http://www.cimplex-project.eu).

Grippenet.ch, a complement to the Sentinella system

In Switzerland, the Sentinella epidemiological surveillance system has been monitoring Flu outbreaks since 1986. Based on weekly reports by doctors, it provides a continuous observation of influenza viruses circulating in the country. The Sentinella platform works in the monitoring of many acute communicable diseases and is used for research in general medicine. Since its start, 150 to 250 GPs participate voluntarily in the Sentinella system each year.

If Sentinella is a well-established and effective system, then why was grippenet.ch developed? "Unlike the Sentinella network that relies on medical practitioners for the declaration of cases of Flu, grippenet.ch gets its data directly from the population, explains Antoine Flahault, Director of the Institute of Global Health at the Faculty of Medicine of UNIGE. This provides us with a monitoring system that could potentially be faster and more flexible than Sentinella, and allows for direct international comparisons of Flu epidemics, since the data is directly comparable with other European countries. In addition, not everyone who gets the Flu sees a doctor, which is why Grippenet.ch is complementary to Sentinella. "The comparison of the two systems gives us important insights for the planning and prioritization of the public health epidemic response, allowing us, for example, to estimate the percentage of people who do not consult a doctor in case of Flu-like symptoms", adds Antoine Flahault.

A precursor system

Thanks to demographic and geographical localization data allowing greater insight into the causes and localization of rising disease clusters, grippenet.ch could give rise to novel research on the transmission and risk factors of influenza epidemics. "Ultimately, our hope is to better prevent and control the course of the epidemic, as well as its negative consequences" explains Antoine Flahault. In the future, this precursor system could be extended to the surveillance of other diseases, including emerging diseases, providing more reactive data than current surveillance systems, thus allowing earlier action.

If you wish to help grippenet.ch by participating in the project, you can

Thursday, 16 November 2017

Ants and humans are equally successful on Earth in terms of biomass. They are in fact the two most successful species, and both are social, i.e. being social is the reason for their phenomenal success.

Ant colonies can contain up to millions of ants, i.e. they are comparable to large cities. An ant has about 250,000 neurons, and their brain weighs less than a gram. A human brain has between 100 billion and 1 trillion neurons and weighs about 1.5 kilograms.

The number of neurons in an ant colony is therefore up to 250,000 * 1,000,000 = 0.25 trillion neurons. That’s roughly comparable to a human brain. Nevertheless, their distributed brain manages to run an entire society, including division of labour. Moreover, in contrast to humans, they managed to survive for 140 million years.

In fact, the recipe for survival is resilience, and resilience benefits from a decentralised organization. For example, our immune system is decentrally organised, in contrast to the central nervous system. Otherwise, we would probably live much shorter than 100 years.

So, those who think that we now need to build an AI brain running humanity as if each of us were like a cell in a human body, will be proven wrong by history.

Note that the difference between ants in an ant colony and humans is that ants are more or less identical genetically while humans are diverse. That’s why human societies are quickly evolving over time while ants aren’t. Diversity is another resilience mechanism, but even more so, it is a motor of innovation, hence a motor of cultural evolution rather than just genetic evolution. Cultural evolution is obviously much faster, i.e. diversity benefits us. That’s also evidenced by economic studies.

Of course, diversity implies challenges such as complexity and of conflicts of interest, so we need to find suitable coordination mechanisms. Personal digital assistants (potentially using AI technology) could do the job, creating collective intelligence that outsmarts the smartest individual and the smartest AI assistant.

In conclusion, a decentralized organization of humanity is advised, and sociodiversity should be protected like biodiversity, if we do not want sustainability, innovation, economic power, and hence the carrying capacity of the Earth to drop.

Tuesday, 31 October 2017

(Pdf of of this article can be downloaded here)Currently there’s a lot of hype surrounding blockchain technology. But the best ways to use it are still to come. Blockchain is often seen as a revolutionary technology, a public decentralized registry that allows for trusted peer-to-peer transactions without middlemen such as banks or other institutions. Blockchain technology is used for new kinds of money and payment systems such as Bitcoin and Ether. However, it also enables to create distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Besides the financial sector, blockchains may revolutionize supply chains, the health system, administrations, humanitarian aid and law enforcement. Like any other technology, however, one must pay attention to possible side effects and ethical implications. For example, if you are late paying the interest rates of your loan, you may not be able to rent a car, or your access to other services might be blocked.

In an over-regulated world, strict law enforcement might even make our economy and society inefficient and dysfunctional. Our old world used to be a world where it was possible to do things that were morally undesirable. With blockchain we are moving to a world where the morally undesirable is made impossible. Even though this may sound good at first, it may actually prevent learning from mistakes and, furthermore, seriously obstruct innovation – since innovation always challenges established solutions.

A further concern is the tendency that non-commercial content in the Internet may gradually be crowded out. Before we are able to get creative, we may then have to deal with a lot of intellectual property rights. To illustrate the implications, just imagine how ineffective it would be, if we had smart contracts for use of language and, therefore, had to pay for every word we use, when communicating with other people. This would be the end of shared culture as we know it.

Over-commercialization and loss of creative freedoms are, therefore, seriously issues to be considered. This is particularly important in times where automation is forcing us to be more creative, and access to data is very limited for ordinary people, start-ups, small and medium-size businesses. According to the WEF and OECD, wealth inequality is already a serious obstacle to economic growth. However, the inequality in accessible data volumes in today’s attention economy is even greater.

Nevertheless, if properly used, blockchain technology is a possible means to reach the next level of human, social, cultural evolution. It can provide society with awareness and collective memory, if the slowness and significant energy consumption of today’s blockchains can be overcome. It could be used to boost creativity, innovation, coordination, sustainability and resilience, hence, enable an entirely new, efficient and trustable organization of the world’s societies at large.

Human evolution depends on the ability to coordinate people with diverse interests and goals. When genetic favouritism (giving advantages to relatives) was partially replaced by direct reciprocity (“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”), societies reached the next level of cooperation. In the past centuries, cultural evolution has further progressed with the implementation of more sophisticated cooperation mechanisms such as “indirect reciprocity” (i.e. reputation- and trust-based systems). Now, with the invention of the blockchain and similar technologies, the next level of society appears to be within reach, as it is possible to establish trust in a peer-to-peer way even between selfish actors, without the need of intermediary institutions.

Blockchain is giving societies an unalterable ledger of our dealings with each other – a veritable registry, on the basis of which reputations can be assessed, and deceit can be unmasked. It is now possible to create collective awareness of how events are actually playing out and how they come about. Blockchain allows one to build a digital society, in which the legitimacy of interactions can be checked and verified.

Delft University of Technology has years of experience with primitive ledgers to record interactions. For instance, the BarterCast ledger records who shared Internet bandwidth with whom. Even when interactions are anonymous, such as in Bittorrent peer-to-peer file sharing environments, using interaction records it is easy to identify and discourage unfair, non-reciprocal use of resources in the system (here: bandwidth).

So, what does this ultimately imply for the way we may all interact in future societies? With the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), blockchain technology can not only cure all sorts of blown-up bureaucratic structures, by coordinating people, resources, and processes in more transparent and efficient ways. It will even allow one to build a new form of socio-ecological, liberal, efficient and democratic kind of capitalism. This will consider externalities of everyone’s activities on their environment and others by combining blockchain technology with the Internet of Things, creating a socio -ecological finance system. In such a way, it is possible to boost a sustainable circular and sharing economy, with a variety of incentives, i.e. new socio-economic feedbacks.

Evolutionary biology shows that human language has evolved to give us the ability to talk about each other. This has boosted survival in a life-threatening world. Next, social intelligence evolved. Now, blockchain technology may create a new basis of truth and trust. A tamper-proof escape from lying, cheating, and hurting others would be a major leap forward in human evolution. We can do this now.

Today’s world lacks memory and awareness of the reality we influence and which influences us. With blockchain technology this can now be changed. However, given that there are different ways of building a blockchain-based society, we must avoid to fall into the trap of a totalitarian post-privacy world, in which people might be restricted – and unnecessarily restrained in unfolding their knowledge, ideas, and talents. If we want to see a world with a level playing field for everyone, we need to insist on responsible blockchain innovations and on using distributed ledger mechanisms for the greater good, rather than allowing them to be usurped and harnessed by a very limited group of people for private interests.

It is important to figure out (e.g. by means of multi-player online games or Virtual Reality experiments) what information should be disclosed to whom and at what point in time, while avoiding harmful information asymmetries. Human dignity, socio-economic diversity, and the outcomes of social self-organization may significantly depend on this.

The digital society we have in mind would offer protection and fair opportunities to all, while fostering collective intelligence, based on the sharing of knowledge and ideas. Openness, interoperability, fair access, and participatory opportunities would allow everyone to stand on the shoulders of others, thereby boosting a thriving society without avoidable shortages. This new digital age would empower everyone to be better informed and more innovative. With a subsidiary form of organization, it would allow everybody to participate in the co-creation of the spheres of life we care about, while helping us to coordinate our creative forces. By considering externalities, this can now be done in a way that minimizes harm to the environment and others while maximizing beneficial effects. So, what are we waiting for? Let’s build the blockchain age together!

Authors

Jeroen van den Hoven is full professor of Ethics and Technology at Delft University of Technology and editor in chief of Ethics and Information Technology.

Johan Pouwelse is an associate professor of computer science at Delft University of Technology. He is founder of the TU Delft Blockchain Lab.

Dirk Helbing is full professor of Computational Social Science at ETH Zürich.

Stefan Klauser is a political scientist and fintech expert at ETH Zurich.

What will happen in a crisis when Artificial Intelligence systems will decide about increasingly many issues, including life and death?

Will a Citizen Score based on Big Data determine our chances of survival?

How should autonomous systems make decisions that are ethically aligned with what is morally required from humans?

We argue that in times of permanent crisis the dominant approach should be innovation instead of optimization.

These days, everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI), robots and self-driving cars. We absolutely agree that these technologies have promising applications and perspectives. So, why then are people like Elon Musk warning us that AI may pose the biggest existential threat to humanity? (1) And what does this have to do with mundane things such as autonomous cars, if anything at all?

Autonomous cars will certainly be involved in accidents where people may die. Then the question is (2-4) when fatalities cannot be prevented – should an autonomous vehicle be programmed to run over a crowd of people on the street, swerve into a smaller group of pedestrians on the walkway or sacrifice the lives of the car passengers by ramming into a concrete wall? Should particular kinds of people be privileged, giving them higher chances of survival? For example, should luxury cars be allowed to offer a higher degree of self-protection as compared to cars in the lower price segment, to create incentives to buy a more expensive car? Would this be ethically justified, given that expensive cars cause more accidents and already impose higher risks on others (5)?

These are the kind of ethical dilemmas that are now frequently discussed. But there is a far bigger problem nobody is openly talking about: In the non-sustainable world we are living in, when there are not enough resources left for everyone, will autonomous systems be used to decide about life and death? If yes, how should they decide? Therefore, when we talk about ethical principles governing how autonomous vehicles deal with matters of life and death, one should always keep in mind the implications for scaled up and generic applications in times of crises. Or to put it in a Kantian form: what if the maxims or policies of these types of machines were to be become the universal principles for all machines?

AI systems knowing “who is who”

With better sensor and video technologies and powerful information systems, artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly capable of distinguishing between one person and many, a child and an elderly person, an average person and a famous politician, a white person and a person of colour, a person with a job or without, a rich and a poor person, a convicted criminal and a saint, a healthy person and one who may die soon, a person with health or life insurance and without?

Should people with higher status or life expectancy be protected, because they may contribute more to society? Should a Citizen Score decide, which represents the value of a person from the point of view of the government, as it is currently being tested in China in other areas of life? (6) Should a person who pays a higher insurance premium have a higher chance of survival and others be sacrificed? This sounds like a profitable business model, but it would fundamentally contradict the principle of equality and human dignity, on which the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is built.

Criteria such as health, age, or social status are not suitable criteria to decide who should come to harm, live or die, not even from a narrow utilitarian perspective. Recall that Kant, the father of Enlightenment, who inspired modern democratic constitutions, wrote his masterpieces at old age. Van Gogh had a very low social status during his lifetime. Mozart died poor. Beethoven was almost deaf when he wrote his 9th symphony. Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec were handicapped and Monet had impaired sight, but they became three of the most important painters of Impressionism. These individuals have created some of the greatest cultural achievements in the history of humankind. Whatever measure is taken to distinguish the value of people, there are always examples that show the inappropriateness of such a measure.

Utilitarian thinking can be inappropriate

The current rulings of many constitutional courts and ethical committees largely agree that people should not be valued differently, but share a common humanity and human dignity. This is also a lesson learned from the history of fascism and the Holocaust. Utilitarian “optimization” appears to be highly immoral, if it intentionally exposes different kinds of people to different life-threatening risks. For example, the new Hippocratic oath (7) requires doctors to swear: “I will not permit considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient.” Perhaps, given that “code is law”, we should require a similar oath from computer scientists and software engineers to ensure design for values (8).

Also note that autonomous systems based on utilitarian principles would be easily exploitable – both by criminals and authorities. Deterministic decisions could be successfully instrumentalized to harm people in cases of manipulation or hacking. For example, someone may jump on the street and force a deterministically deciding vehicle to crash into a concrete wall, or someone may trigger or hack the vehicle sensors to trick it into a dangerous manoeuvre that might put passengers at risk. Other drivers may anticipate the safety behaviour of the type of car you are driving and exploit its response repertoire for personal advantage. In such cases, a probabilistic decision rule would make it less likely that an autonomous system could be successfully instrumentalized against other people. Overall, if ethical dilemmas cannot be avoided, decisions should be randomized, giving each person the same weight. A society with ubiquitous AI requires a framework that is impartial, as proposed by the Harvard political philosopher John Rawls with his concept of “the veil of ignorance” (9). This implies that, in deciding about the basic normative principles of a society, one should ignore properties that could be tailored to serve self-interests. This, again, suggests that humans should not be treated differently in a critical situation and solutions based on utilitarian grounds should be rejected.

Killing algorithms are not science-fiction

Very soon, the ethics of autonomous systems may affect all of our lives every day. In turbulent times, as we may encounter them in an unsustainable world, decisions about life and death may become commonplace. Today, robocops are being tested, drones are being used to kill dissidents, and a number of autonomous weapons are in the making (10, 11). Some experts even think about AI-based euthanasia (12) and the use of palliative means. Soon, computer-controlled implants may be used to release drugs to our bodies, but such devices would be vulnerable to hacking and may cause overdoses (13, 14).

Let us assume or a moment, one would apply the Citizen Score, as it is currently tested in China, or the United Kingdom’s KARMA POLICE program (15) to make decisions about life and death – saving those who have a higher score. Such a “digital judgment day” approach would create one of the most serious moral hazards imaginable. “The elite”, i.e. the people with the highest scores, would always have the lowest risks and the greatest opportunities. Therefore, why should they make a serious effort to improve the opportunities and risks of all the others, if it will not improve their own lives? In contrast, an unbiased probabilistic decision rule in combination with a fair veil of ignorance, would put everyone at the same level of risk, and hence everybody would have an incentive to reduce the number of ethical dilemmas as much as possible.

Humanity has a moral obligation to prevent the occurrence of ethical dilemmas, i.e. choice situations where one cannot fulfil all moral norms at the same time. Furthermore, if ethical dilemmas occur nevertheless, there is an obligation to transform them into situations which expand the set of obligations one can satisfy, whenever possible. A Citizen-Score-based system would certainly miss this goal. It provides a framework suggesting we can fulfill our moral duties by optimization that weighs and counts lives and deaths, and that such a decision can be automated and dealt with by a machine.

To minimize the number of critical situations, we do not only need the best use of human and artificial intelligence, but creativity as well. In a crisis, innovation may be more important than optimization. To successfully address the sustainability challenges of our planet, we may have to fundamentally change the monetary, financial, and economic system, or even the organization of society altogether (16,17). Given the limitations of optimization, Citizen-Scores-based systems and utility maximization, we should spend much more resources on systemic innovation, e.g. on participatory resilience and City Olympics, where cities all over the world and the regions around them would regularly compete for the best environmental-friendly, energy-efficient, resource-saving, crisis-proof, and peace-promoting solutions (18). Such approaches could dramatically improve the future prospects of humanity within a short period of time.

References

S. Gibbs, The Guardian, Monday 27 October 2014, available at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/27/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-ai-biggest-existential-threat

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The activities leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 284709 - project 'FuturICT', a Coordination and Support Action in the Information and Communication Technologies activity area